Crafting Your Message

Our Blast product enables you to engage with your customers and prospects in a scalable, effective way. To get the most out of your Blast campaigns, it is important to make sure your messages are relevant, personalized, and appropriately timed. This article provides some insight into how to craft your campaign messages.

Outline Your Campaign

Within our platform, you have the ability schedule one or more messages within a single campaign. Similar to how email drip campaigns, Blast will allow you to setup staggered text messages to go out to the same set of recipients as part of a single campaign. Messages are scheduled to go out in order based off of the specified date and time. Read through our Scheduling Your Campaign article for more info on scheduling.

It is important to evaluate:

•  Who is your campaign audience
• How many campaign messages are needed and their contents
• The order and timeliness of the messages

Campaign Audience

When planning out your campaign, it is important to think through who the target audience is of the messages. The most effective campaigns are ones where the messages are delivered to recipients who have indicated they want to receive texts from your company and the message is relevant to them.

To ensure you are targeting the right audience for your messages:

1. Validate that you have acquired the appropriate Opt-Ins to send messages to every single recipient on your Blast list.
2. Segment your contacts in ways that allow you to send more relevant and personalized messages. Check out our article on Organizing Contacts with Lists.
3. Make sure you that your Contact Lists have descriptive names so it is easy to understand the purpose of each list.

Crafting Campaign Messages

You have a lot of options within Blast to craft the contents of your messages to deliver the information you want. 

Enhancing Your Message Content

Text messages do not have to be boring. There are a number of options you can access within our platform to enhance your message content and make an impact on the recipients. 

1. Use Dynamic Parameters to personalize the message(s) to your contacts. Using this feature will add a personal touch to the campaign, even though the messages are delivered at scale.
2. Add Emojis to give the message content some visual variety.
3. Add images or attachments to provide visual aids or pass documents that may be helpful in reinforcing your messaging.

Including Opt-Out Language

To adhere to the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act), the first message you send to new contacts must include a statement that clearly states how to opt-out of future communications. For that reason, it is critical that any Blast message sent that includes new contacts contains instructions to the recipient on how they can opt out of receiving text messages from you. If this is not included, it is likely that your message will get blocked by the carrier. Generally, our clients add a sentence at the end of their message indicating how recipients can stop receiving messages, e.g. "Reply STOP to opt out."

For any text messages that originated or were received by our system, our platform automatically tracks the opt in and opt outs of contacts. We will not send a text message to a contact that has opted out of receiving texts from your business, even if you include them in your recipient list.

Managing Message Size

To accommodate varying carrier limits, our platform has is a limit of 500 characters per message. We provide a character counter above the input box to help you keep track of your character usage and will not allow additional typing past the 500 character limit. 

View full size

There are instances when adding images to your message can enhance your text, or in some cases, it is best to just send an image by itself as the message. Should you want to use an image, keep these things in mind:

• The maximum image size allowed is 550KB
• Acceptable file formats are: jpg, gif, and png

NOTE: The maximum size of the total message, whether images are used or not, is 600KB. Please be mindful of the size of your image when using it in conjunction of text.

Campaign Order & Timeliness

Just like email, there are more preferable days and times to receive messaging from businesses. Unless the messaging is tied to specific event times, it is generally best to avoid texting late into the evenings and early in the morning. Our platform will limit the send window of Blasts if it violates the TCPA guidelines, based on your account's time zone.

• If you have multiple messages within your campaign, evaluate the timing between each message. The cadence of your messaging should provide the recipient time to review each message before the next one is sent. 
• It is also important with multiple messages, to ensure the order of the messages provides the information you want at the right time.
• If your campaigns are tied to specific events that have schedules, try to align your messaging with the events to make them not only relevant but timely.